Rage: The Reckoning

by Christopher C. Page

  It was the kind with the criss-cross patterned frame and the weird aluminum bars on the top of it. He’d have no trouble climbing down, when the time came. Not tonight of course, maybe not even this month, his dad would expect that. Besides, as much as he wanted to get back to his life in the city, he didn’t even know where his mom was, yet. The fact that she was so tightlipped about her exact location worried Mark. He knew she didn’t want his dad showing up and making a scene, but he was hurt by her refusal to tell him where she was living. He feared that she had either changed her mind about letting him move in with her, or that her new “boyfriend” had said no.

  With that, his thoughts drifted to his father. As much as he hated him right now, he couldn’t help sympathizing with him, at least a little. His wife leaves him, then his partner and best friend gets shot right in front of him, now he has to go back to wearing a uniform in some dinky cow town in the middle of nowhere. His dad was pretty tough, Mark didn’t doubt that, but he couldn’t help but wonder how much more he could take. But no matter how tough things had gotten so far, he never took it out on Mark. Not once. He couldn’t run out on him now.

  Not yet.

  Mark was all he had left. But maybe in a month or two, once he had a chance to settle in at his new job, and once his mother got the okay from her new (whatever he is) boyfriend . . . then he’d go. He’d wait till his dad was asleep, climb out the window and down the antennae to a waiting car, maybe a short walk to the bus station (if there was one in this shithole of a town) and get back to the city, where he belonged.

  Mark moved into the master bedroom which, like the rest of the house, appeared to have been used for nothing other than a storage room. The room was stuffy and humid. Some of the boxes seemed to be putting off heat of their own which Mark was sure was probably dangerous. The bedroom faced the front yard and through the grime covered window panes, he saw his dad standing out in the driveway talking to the driver of the moving van while two other men were preparing to unload their belongings. His dad was gesturing up to the house with his hands and the driver was shaking his head defiantly.

  This wasn’t going to be pretty.

  Three

  John did his best to negotiate a deal with the movers, but when all was said and done, they had him by the balls. In the end, they agreed to take the contents out of the house and stack it in the dilapidated garage. However, the foreman explained, they already had a second move scheduled for later that day so they wouldn’t be able to stay and carry the contents of the moving truck inside the house. For an additional hundred bucks, for each of the five men, they’d empty the house and drop John’s stuff on the front lawn.

  With no other options at his disposal, he agreed to their terms and watched as the crew unloaded all of their belongings on the front lawn as if he were holding a yard sale. They broke for lunch, eating sandwiches out of coolers they sat on. An hour later, fed and rested, the men attacked the contents of the house, making trip after trip out to the garage, stacking what was left of the boxes and furniture as neatly as possible.

  At two o’clock that afternoon, John was unpacking their dishes and utensils in the kitchen when he heard the big Volvo diesel revving and falling in quick succession as the tractor-trailer drove off. He dashed through the living room and out the front door just catching a glimpse of the truck as it turned the corner at the end of the block and disappeared from view. He checked the upstairs and found that they had more or less held up their end. There was still some furniture, a few bed frames, a couple of dressers, and a few boxes still stacked in the hallway near the staircase, but otherwise the house was empty. All that remained was to bring everything they owned off of the front lawn into the house.

  He and Mark ate two frozen pizzas for lunch, a meat lovers for John and a vegetarian for Mark, which they ate standing up in the kitchen before resuming their work. As they progressed, the tally John made in his head of the work to be done continued to grow. The floors turned out to be in good condition, under the circumstances, but not much more could be said in a positive light. Although the windows were painted shut, a stiff breeze whistled through the house as if they were open. The furnace was an ancient cast iron relic from the seventies and the bottom of the water heater was leaking onto the dirt floor in the basement. On the second floor, in two of the bedrooms, the plaster ceiling had large spots where a leaky roof had obviously let the water in. Even if John did all the work himself (which he no doubt would have to out of necessity), the materials alone were going to cost him well into the thousands.

  Thousands he no longer had to spare.

  Most of their furniture consisted of what John had owned back in college before he’d met Audrey. Once they married, she made him lock it up in storage so he hadn’t seen any of these things since. It was mostly cheaply made stuff that you had to assemble yourself from instructions written in Swedish, and there was no way in hell its presence would be allowed to infect the beauty of their house in Rosedale. So for fifteen years the stuff had been collecting dust at one of those store-it-yourself storage places. A simple living room set consisting of a fold out couch, a coffee table and two small end-tables, all in black and a big 32” TV that must have weighed close to two-hundred pounds. They had a cheap pine dining set with four chairs for the kitchen, various odds and ends for the cupboards and a bunch of mismatched bar glasses, mostly lifted from establishments frequented long ago. A microwave, a bar fridge, a bed and two dressers, was all they had now. Before Mark was born, he and Audrey had lived quite well (cops in Toronto didn’t usually live in Rosedale and their wives didn’t have trust accounts with six-figure allowances in them), but John grew up poor so his eyes were wide open. Poor Mark had been born into it and the sudden reversal of fortune was going to be hard on him.

  John sent Mark to bed at midnight and then stayed up himself until just after two before calling it a day. He took two sleeping pills, hoping that the combination of the pills and general exhaustion from lifting boxes all day would be enough to give him a peaceful sleep for a change. It was wishful thinking. The dream came, just like always. The white-knuckle inducing drive through traffic, the dash down the long hallway that seemed to go on forever, standing outside Crystal Lee's door, Jimmy at his left side, gun drawn. Pushing the heavy steel door, the look of panic in Jimmy’s eyes when they realized that they had given themselves away. The screaming from inside the apartment growing more anguished until the latch finally gave away. Bryan Walsh, the man, the thing, that had ruined so many lives, the face they had only seen in photographs and mug shots, was smiling at them through the cruelest eyes either of them could imagine. He was behind Crystal Lee, or soon to be confirmed murder victim number four, with a massive right arm gripped around her head. In his left hand, he appeared to be holding a broken kitchen knife against her throat, just under her chin. Later, during the subsequent investigation and trial they would learn that the knife wasn’t at all short, four inches of the blade had penetrated the victim’s lower jaw, impaling her tongue and cracking the roof of her mouth like a nutshell.

  Then, the sonic blast of gunfire, the falling bodies, and the acrid smell of blood mixed with gun smoke. Off in the distance, barely distinguishable, the sound of sirens.

  - - -

  The drone of the alarm clock on the nightstand replaced the sirens in his dream. John rolled over and slapped the snooze button, considering whether or not to sleep for another hour and then thought better of it, he had too much to do that morning. He threw his legs over the side of the bed and rolled his head back and forth between his shoulders, trying to work out the soreness from the previous day’s activity, which had only ended four short hours before. His joints cracked and creaked in unison as he rose to his feet. At 6’4”, weighing a solid two-twenty, he was still in pretty good shape for his age, but he was finding that he had to work harder and harder to slow the progress of the roll forming at his waistline. He tried to eat healthy, rarely drank alcohol, and worked out whenever he h
ad the time which, for the past year, he hadn’t. His profession required him to eat on the run so that usually limited his options to either fast food or huge doses of caffeine just to make it through the day. He was fairly sure that Ratcliff had no fast food joints or drive-thrus so maybe he'd take the opportunity to change his diet.

  He began his day by polishing his shoes; this would be the first time he would wear the blue uniform in about ten years out side of a parade or a funeral. Next, he showered and shaved. He wasn’t sure how strict they were about those kinds of things up here as sometimes smaller districts like this one, far from the prying eyes of their superiors, had their own way of doing things. But he wasn't going to chance getting written up on his first day if his new boss turned out to be a hard ass. Plus, he knew that everyone would be watching him, waiting for any opportunity to point out the slightest deficiency so that they could say ‘See? He’s not so special’.

  62 Division ran a rotating shift schedule that began with the 9 to 5 shift. With just eighteen full-time officers employed there, that broke down to three shifts a day of only six officers to answer calls and protect the town. After three weeks, he'd move to 4pm till midnight, and finally, midnight to 8am three weeks after that. It was the afternoon shifts that concerned John the most because Mark would have to fend for himself after school, eat a decent meal, and put himself to bed at a reasonable hour. There was no point in dwelling on it. Lots of parents had kids at home and still had to work rotating shifts. Over the past nine months, Mark had been forced to take care of himself on an increasingly regular basis, now he was able to make his own meals and do his laundry. Proud as that made John, he couldn’t help but feel as though his son no longer needed him for anything. Mark was already much smarter than he was academically speaking so he never even needed help with school assignments. In fact, before John could help him, Mark would have had to teach him just what in the hell he was talking about.

  John went downstairs to get breakfast started and heard Mark walk down the hall above him. The bathroom door clicked shut and the hum of the electric water pump rose up from the basement as it kicked on, causing the pipes directly under the floorboards to rattle so hard that he could actually feel it in the soles of his feet.

  Fifteen minutes later, Mark came downstairs and joined him in the kitchen, smartly dressed, wearing khakis and a collared shirt, his eyes puffy and moving with the kind of slowness that almost every kid exhibits on a Monday when they have to go back to school.

  “How’d you sleep?” John asked as he slid a plate of scrambled eggs and toast onto the table.

  “What sleep?” Mark grumbled, eyeballing the eggs suspiciously.

  “It’s hard in a new place, you’ll get used to it.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Mark said.

  They ate their breakfast in total silence. John wanted to say so much to his son but what little he knew about parenting came from his time with Audrey. And typical of most parents of the modern age, their respective roles tended to lean towards what Audrey had affectionately called; Good Cop/Bad Cop. Since John was rarely there, he took the position of loving disciplinarian. Whenever Mark got out of line, smarting off to his mother or a teacher, or failing a subject, John stepped in and straightened him out. Never in a physical manner, at least not since Mark was about five and needed a good smack on the butt to get his full attention. He made sure that he knew he was loved, but when he screwed up, he also knew he’d have some explaining to do.

  Audrey, on the other hand, let Mark have his way provided he remained open about what was going on in his life. They talked about their feelings and their experiences openly together in a way that had always made John uneasy, but it seemed to work. The first time Mark ever got into a scuffle, tried a cigarette, or liked a girl . . . he told her about it.

  John felt that they had done a pretty good job with him, but he had concerns about their new situation. Now, there was no good cop, only the authoritarian. With Audrey gone, there was nobody to tell Mark that he was handsome or comfort him through the inevitable heartbreaks of adolescence. Whenever John tried to fill those roles, it was awkward and forced. More often than not, Mark would get embarrassed and accuse John of trying to be too ‘perfect’ before withdrawing and refusing to speak to him for several days.

  Of all the things that John Stevens thought about himself, perfect wasn’t even on the radar.

  They finished their breakfast in cold silence, after which he handed Mark his lunch and saw him to the door. He could tell that he was anxious, but couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make him feel worse. He settled for, “Knock em dead, slugger”, which he immediately regretted.

  Mark walked right by him, his backpack slung over one shoulder, and he let John know exactly what he was feeling. “This sucks.”

  He was right. John couldn’t tell him that though because after all, he was the one that had dragged him up here in the first place. After gathering his uniform and checking the stove, he was just about to leave when he noticed that Mark was still standing at the end of the driveway.

  He was talking to himself again.

  It seemed to have started right about the time that Audrey moved out. One night, John had gotten up to use the washroom and on his way past Mark’s bedroom and overheard him having a conversation. At first, he’d assumed that he was talking to his mother, perhaps even a friend from school. But when John picked up the extension, there was only dial tone. The next morning, while Mark was taking a shower, he checked his cell, there were no calls either incoming or outgoing. Since then, he’d heard him doing it more and more often. Initially John had written if off to the stress of adolescence. It wasn’t uncommon to catch other people, sometimes yourself, talking out loud as they try and work out a problem in their heads. But now, almost a year later, he was still doing it and that concerned him.

  Four

  “She’s a CUNT. They’re ALL cunts.”

  Mark stopped dead in his tracks. He spun around on his heels half expecting to see his father standing in the doorway, though he couldn’t imagine his father saying such a thing, but there was nobody there. Across the street, an elderly woman sporting a hideous pink robe and matching curlers was in her driveway, bending over to pick up the paper that hadn’t quite made it to the front door where she wanted it. Someone would be getting a call from someone else that had nothing better to do but complain about anything and everything and had all the time in the world to do it. Somehow, Mark doubted that the C word was in her vocabulary.

  He wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d been standing there at the end of the driveway, he was supposed to be standing on the corner by eight o’clock. At the end of the block, a long orange bus rumbled past the end of their street, checking the time on his phone he saw it was ten minutes past. He didn’t want to go to school today anyway, there didn’t seem to be any point. With any luck, he’d be gone by this time next month. Once he got back to his own school where he belonged, he’d have to play catch up for a few weeks, but that was fine. All the teachers knew him and what he was capable of doing when he applied himself. In the meantime, he was screwed.

  If he didn’t show up for class, the school would be on the phone with his dad in two point four seconds and his dad would watch him very carefully after that. Besides, where the heck was he supposed to go in this stupid town? He performed a map search on his phone and found that the high school was a staggering sixty kilometers away. Even if his legs and arms weren’t still aching from yesterday’s workout, which they were (if he lived the rest of his life without carrying another box, either up or down stairs that’d be just fine with him), even if he started walking now, he’d be lucky to make it by noon tomorrow.

  “Who do you suppose carried her boxes when she split?” The familiar voice said from nowhere and everywhere, all at once. “She’s a worthless WHORE. They’re all worthless whores.”

  The Boy. That’s what Mark called him.

  He couldn’t remember whe
n the Boy had first appeared but part of him felt as if he had been there all along. Sometimes he would go away for months at a time, but Mark always felt as if he were still nearby, polishing the scope mounted rifle he always carried on a sling over his shoulder, the big Remington like the one his dad kept locked in the gun-cabinet. The Boy seemed to beckon Mark to follow him, always far ahead of him, hard to see as if hiding behind a wall of fog with only the occasional flash of the red sweater he wore to show that he was still there. Up until recently, The Boy rarely spoke to him except for the occasional remark or question. But recently, something seemed to have woken him up.

  There was something strangely comforting about these visits though. If it had been otherwise, Mark would have told his father about him which would have no doubt landed him in a mental hospital like the one in that movie with Jack Nicholson. But the Boy was harmless, except for the rifle. He seemed to be a friend, perhaps a kindred spirit of some sort, until recently that is. Now it seemed to Mark that the Boy had grown confrontational, mocking him almost to the point of bullying. So far, Mark hadn’t taken the bait and that seemed to only enrage the Boy further.

  He must have been standing there for a while, waiting for him to say more, the screen door creaked open behind him and his father came out onto the porch with his bag in one hand and his keys in the other.

  “Mark?” he said, looking around as if he had been expecting someone else. “Who are you talking to?”